Posts Tagged ‘Farbs’

The song remix: giving us banging new takes on songs we love, banal ‘club remix’ filler for singles, and sometimes smashing the original to pieces. Game remixes are a bit more rare but we have had some real wonders like Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (not forgetting the unofficial squillions made by indies who carefully dodge copyright infringement). Now Pixelsaurus Games have announced Captain Forever Remix, an “officially-licensed reimagining” of Farbs’s fine ship-building space shooter Captain Forever. It’s ace source material, but what’s the remix mixing up?

This falls into something of a grey area between trad. RPS posts and the Bargain Bucket, but I’m going to do it anyway because my last post was a trailer for a ludicrously high-budget first-person shooter and, were I to be struck down by lightning or a panther attack or angry Heroes of Might & Magic fans in the next half-hour, I don’t want that to be my legacy.

So, just a note that Farbs’ splendid Captain Forever quasi-trilogy has seen its pricetag shot down from $20 to a mere $9 – which also gets you all future updates in the adventure-tinged arena shooter series. It also includes a new build of the in-development third title Captain Jameson, which gets all RPGy. “This is an as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, so as soon as income (sales x price) drops below regular levels the sale will end. If the games sell well enough then the sale could go on indefinitely, but it could also end tomorrow,” sez Farbs. Farbs, incidentally, is now part of the team making Card Hunter – whose latest news I shall post shortly.

Jack de Quidt directs us at Farbs’ (Mr Captain Forever) new project. It’s called Playpen. It’s basically a wiki-isation of a storytelling pixel game. So you explore this pixel-world, clicking on hotspots. If you find yourself inspired, you can click into edit, and add your own pixel art to the design, or other hot-spots. These can link to new locations or just provide a bit of text. I can’t wait to see what results and – as evidenced above – have already contributed to the world. Farbs should feel lucky that I didn’t just do what we used to do on screenshots back in my magazine days and draw an enormous urinating phallus over it. There wasn’t a new screenshot of a much anticipated game which passed through our hands without being emblazoned with some manner of a cock. “Oh no! What are Id thinking? Why have they put a gigantic penis on their latest Quake 3 grab?” we cried. Smartest men in games journalism, us. Er… anyway! Go have a nose around Playpen. It really is delightful.

I’ve wanted to post about this again for a while, but it’s non-inclusion in the IGF has given me motivation. I’ve still not been able to totally put my back into it, but it’s the sort of game which strikes me is exactly what certain of you are looking for. It’s a Sinistar-esque shooter, but with a sandbox design based around constructing your own ship from the parts of your fallen opponents. You can go and look at it here play the sort of limited demo, consider throwing down money for access to Captain Successor, but there’s also some videos available which sort of show its vibe far better…Read the rest of this entry »